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Okay, that's it, Comcast...
01-09-2011, 09:12 PM
I just had my net service disappear on me for about 43 hours. Shortly after I had to log off of City of Heroes on Friday evening to go pick up Peggy from work, my cable modem lost all signal, and nothing I could do would prompt it to reconnect. Until it spontaneously rediscovered the Net this afternoon between noon and 12:30.
This is not a new problem for me. I've been having connectivity problems like this for close to 2 years now. It used to be that every few months I'd have three or four days when the modem would suddenly drop the Net. Powercycling it usually brought the connection back, though. I've been complaining to Comcast all this time, of course -- I've had the modem replaced two or three times (most recently on New Year's Eve), had splitters and connectors replaced, and the signal strength adjusted as well. After every incident, things would be okay for several months, and then it would start all over again.
Except now, it's down to days. Twice in the last week, the connection just died and would not come back until it was good and ready -- the first for 15 hours and then this latest event. I'm putting Comcast on notice -- not just here but on their recorded support line and in their customer service logs: fix this permanently by the end of February, or I take all my business to Dish Network and Optimum Online.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
CattyNebulart
Unregistered
Comcast is often regarded as the worst ISP in america for a reason. We had similar problems except at one point they became week long outages. I miss the European ISPs and cell phone providers.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
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Kinda reminds me the time I was living in Richmond, VA with some roomies (we were in an old place right off Carrie Rd, for the curious) when we got DSL from AT&T. It was great for the first week... and then suddenly the bandwidth for just about the entire county (and then some) shrank to damn near nothing. AT&T was really the only business in town for broadband internet at the time because they'd just snapped up the other local provider. Thus it took months to resolve - and by then some people were so fed up that there was talk of several households splitting a T-1 line.
In the end, it turned out that it was because AT&T had started providing service to the local community college and they were in no way prepared for that kind of load - they just had their eyes on the dollar signs.
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I've so far had no problems with Verizon fios as far as reliability is concerned and I'm in Kensington, MD.
Problem in U.S. is lack of competition in the market IMO the Issue here is that the ISP providers know they are the only game in town so they treat customers shittily and charge far more than they should for service.
--Werehawk--
My mom's brief take on upcoming Guatemalan Elections "In last throes of preelection activities. Much loudspeaker vote pleading."
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I used to have similar problems with my cable television. They replaced my cable box about a half dozen times, despite me telling them repeatedly that it probably wouldn't help as none of the previous replacements had helped. They finally sent someone to thoroughly look things over and he figured out that the box was receiving almost no signal because there was something wrong with the wire that they'd strung under the house from the external box to the wall jack.
----------------------------------------------------
"Anyone can be a winner if their definition of victory is flexible enough." - The DM of the Rings XXXV
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Ditto on what werehawk said. Here in Japan, they've done everything they can to foster competition and progress among ISPs... and now Japan has some of the most insane bandwidth in the world (hence why it is an impressive feat to bring down a .jp website).
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And down in Australia were we have competition and a mix of good to ridiculous pricing for a variety of net connection speeds, the government made a fiat decision to force everyone to a new broadband network still being developed and installed. What that means I've a supposed two-years before I lose my cable modem connection and get switched over to fiber, for everything!
Means I'm going to be looking at getting a UPS just so that the landline phone will stay active during a blackout. Also leaves me with questions of how much for what speed, what usage cap and just what limitations are they going to impose- skype:yes/no? bittorrent:yes/no? etc...
--Rod.H
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Dear god almighty this is EXACTLY the problem I was having with Comcast/Time Warner back a few years ago!
The whole "it HAS to be the modem, let us replace it!" "NO NO NO NO NO!!! We already DID that 5 times! GET A GODDAMN LINE TECH OUT HERE!!" merry-go-round finally stopped when I outright called them on their bullshit and started the process to cancel my account. THEN and ONLY THEN did they bump me to what I call "Executive Tech support" which is when they assign a specific individual case worker to you from corporate who actually has the authority to force the subcontractors to get off their lazy asses and get out to the house and fix the bloody wire.
My recommendation Bob? Don't give them another chance to put you on that merry-go-round again. Just call them up and start the process to cancel your account NOW and explain that it is specifically because of piss-poor service that you are doing so and that you'll be warning other friends and family not to use them.
You'll be AMAZED at how fast they suck up to you and actually try to fix the problem then. But you have to hold that sword to their throat the whole way. Never let them think that you are in any way mollified or satisfied with their new-found dedication to pleasing you. Always keep the threat alive that you are -this close- to canceling, even if it may not be true.
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Okay, update.
At some time between 5:45 and 6:00 PM yesterday, the signal went out again. But that gave me enough information to realize I had a loose or bad connection right on the exterior of the house, where they cable comes in -- because I realized after several days' data points that the signal only came back on sunny days, late in the morning -- and always disappeared 30 to 45 minutes after sundown. And that meant to me a marginal connection somewhere that had gone bad and was now only closing the circuit when it had heated up enough for the metal parts to meet.
Now, let me tell you a little about Comcast in this area. Apparently, they don't own the cable lines, they lease them from another company, or rent usage, or something. And apparently that company is a bit more concerned about technical matters and performance than Comcast is.
I already had an appointment for a modem upgrade this afternoon (this wasn't being done as a fix, it was just something one of the techs said I could get for free and he might as well put me in for it to make up for some of the trouble I've endured). So the tech comes today, and although his truck and ID say "Comcast", his jacket and fluorescent vest have a different company name and logo on it. He swaps in this new "D3" modem, and while it's doing a ten-minute suite of power-on tests I tell him about the line problem. Well, I had to -- the line was still dead and he couldn't test the modem.
He grumbled about how rotten the Comcast techs were, listened to my theory about what was happening, and agreed with me. He headed out into the snow on the garage side of the house, and in ten minutes had my line up and running again. Then he grumbled some more about the Comcast techs. Then he finished the modem setup, tested the speed, and said "Wow!" loud enough for me to hear him from the other side of the house. Apparently with the new modem I'm now getting a download speed of over 40 Mbs -- enough that he was impressed, and kept being impressed until he left.
The acid test, of course, is in about 90 minutes, when the sun has been down for a while and everything cools down. If I'm still here in the morning, congratulate me.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Out of curiosity, what result do you get on speedtest.net now?
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
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And the result is...
![[Image: 1106032954.png]](http://www.speedtest.net/result/1106032954.png)
Which doesn't match what he showed me, but then again, he was measuring upstream of the router, which has at least 4 devices on it.
Also, I know that Comcast imposes a ceiling on my speeds. He was probably able as a company tech to see the "real" speeds, but I've still got the throttles on.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Y'know, I may be the only person in creation who has only had a *good* experience with Comcast.
When I worked in Arlington, VA (2000-2001), the local cable company was some outfit I had never heard of. Whilst I was there, due to the way the phone lines were set up, the only high speed I could get (unless I wanted to pay $200/mo for 64kbit ISDN) was one-way cable modem through them.
Some time in late 2000, Comcast took over. Within a week, they had replaced all the cable equipment in my region, and came in on a Saturday afternoon to replace my cablemodem with a 2-way. For the remaining 12-14 months of my stay there, I had wonderful, reliable service.
I mean, I'm not discounting your bad experiences, I just find it amusing that without your (and others') reports, I would have thought they're great.
CattyNebulart
Unregistered
I had a great comcast experience around 2003-2004 or therish. after that came outages every other month which then became every month and they also kept getting longer, and making due a week without service well that kind of erases any good impression one might have had.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
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Another person chiming in with the "They started out great, and then went to crap" message.
Back in... I want to say it was '02 or thereabouts, I signed up with them because the other option was ISDN and I'd dealt with that quite enough at work; DSL wasn't available in our area at the time. For the first year they were awesome. Then, when I elected to stay month-to-month instead of signing up for another year's contract, stuff started to go downhill.
My roommate at the time got sick of it and decided to sign up for another year's contract, on the theory that if we gave them more money things would go back to the way they were. It... didn't work that way.
The real annoyance was that, when we challenged the contract (and won, because we'd documented the downtime) and broke it to switch to the just-arrived DSL, they refused to acknowledge that we'd returned the modem, and hit us with a $400 bill. Which we refused to pay, because we had a receipt showing we'd returned the modem -- physically, to their local office, as instructed.
Six 'clerical errors' and exchange of nasty letters later, the bill finally vanished... only to show up on my credit report four years afterwards. I finally got it off there -- for good, I hope -- in 2008.
Fuck Comcast. Sideways, with a saguaro.
Edit: It would have been 2000, not '02, now that I think on it -- I remember celebrating the millennium in that apartment.  But the credit report issue wasn't resolved until '08, because that's when we refinanced the car and I discovered shenanigans.
--sofaspud
-- "Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs
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Meanwhile, at HUGHESNET
01-13-2011, 01:21 AM
Heck, even with all that crap, I'd almost be glad to have Comcast available where I am. My only two choices are Sattelite, and a local wireless ISP, and it turns out my local trees block the wireless unless I put up a 50ft+ tower.
I've had Hughesnet since back when they were Direcway, since they first came out with a modem that didn't have to run on software installed on the PC (so I could connect my Linux machines). The experience has never been good, frankly. But this week they managed to completely overtop themselves in incompetence.
They've been bugging me to upgrade my modem for a long time now. And I've finally gotten fed up with getting my connection throttled (read "killed," for any webpage more complex than a ff.net page) for 24hrs at a stretch if I happen to download more than 200MB in a single 24hr period (hint: don't buy two Amazon MP3 albums on the same day). And if I can get 50kpbs, it's time to cry for joy. Watching Youtube vids is an exercise in "hit pause, walk away, come back later and un-pause". And of course you have NO IDEA how close you're getting to the cap until after you hit it. There *is* a web page that will tell you what you've been using, hour-by-hour, but the most recent update is always 2hrs behind realtime.
(Steam? Yaright. WoW? Fuggediboutit. And I HATE HATE HATE Steve Jobs for making it IMPOSSIBLE to automate Itunes to download media and/or their FSKING HUGE PROGRAM UPDATES during the "free window" between 2AM and 7AM)
So, this week. I finally bit the bullet, upped my service plan... and got told I had to upgrade my modem for the new plan to work. Fine, click, click, order placed, modem arrives. Install is painless, just swap cables. Check System Status page on the internal webserver.... SIGNAL STRENGTH ONLY 29!?!?!? It was 60 a minute ago!
Call in. Get Indian woman with No Clue and bad accent over a lousy connection. Do the Level 1 Tech Support Tango for 1.5hrs. Finally get bumped up to L3. The engineer works with me for about 30min, then starts checking all my system specs... oh. Turns out I not only have to have a new modem, I have to have the DISH HARDWARE replaced as well. Which he immediately set me up for at no cost, by way of apology, which is Totally Cool -- the L3 engineer was great. But there's nobody in my house from early to late -- we all work weird, long hours, and I'm going to be gone working in Canada this weekend, and next, and...
And just to ice the cake: the one part of the modem upgrade process that DID work was the part that KILLED THE OLD MODEM in order to transfer the authorization keys to the new one. A process that can't be undone (well, probably could be, but it would almost certainly be a great big pain). So until I can find a time slot to get the sat-tech into my house, I have no internet at home. None. Well, wait, I still have an old dialup account that I keep going for my sister (further out in the boonies than me, no money for sat-net), but that only gets 28.8, maybe 33.6 going downhill with a brisk tailwind on a bright sunny day. Around here, you can tell how much its raining by watching the dialup speed drop.
....whew! I didn't realize I needed to vent that so bad. Thanks for listening.
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Since my parents have HughesNet up in the mountains where they've got a place, I've found a neat little program to monitor (in real time) your FAP "bucket". It can help ease some of the pains with them, though it can only read from 7000 or 9000 type modems.
---
The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."
>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI
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OMG. I think I'm in love.
Of course, this just pisses me off at HughesNet even more, since they obviously could providing this information live and in realtime, and won't. Heck, they've never even been willing to release the formula by which they calculate the actual FAP trip point, deliberately keeping it vague so no one can call them on it.
On a side note, it's been three days since the Upgrade Disaster, and I still haven't been contacted by HN's tech support.
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Slight digression from the topic perhaps, but FAP as I understand it:
(using numbers for my parents, which may or may not be representative of your connection)
Imagine you have this big 500MB bucket, filled with data. Data leaves this bucket and is sent to your computer as fast as your connection speed allows (Around 300-400 KB/s for us), but data only is poured into the bucket at a fixed, independent speed (115 KB/s for us). You get full speed with your connection only as long as there is data in the bucket. Once it's empty, you're subject to the Fair Access Policy, and your speed is limited until your bucket fills back up.
This program tells you how much data you have left in your bucket.
---
The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."
>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI
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